widgets

How are you going getting comments from people other than your classmates?

Have you received comments from overseas visitors?

Has anyone in your family left a comment? Remember you might need to teach them how to leave a comment.

Activity 1: Write a post about your family – include their interests, where you might have been together as a family. Remember to include grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles.

Activity 2: Encourage family members to leave comments on your posts over the next few weeks. Check out Mrs Yollis and her class who celebrate family blogging month in November.

Activity 3: How can you increase the number of comments on your blog? Write a post about ways to get more comments on your blog. Be creative and think outside the square – can you find at least ten ways to get more visitors and comments? You might want to make a poster for this activity.

Activity 4: Have a family member write a post for you to add to your blog. They could write it and email or post it to you. Does this post attract more visitors or family members leaving comments? One family member regularly blogs on Mrs Yollis’ blog – Where is nonno?

Activity 5: Interview a family member and write a post about them – include the interview recording. You could use audioboom online or from your phone then upload the file to your blog. Make sure you ask permission first before putting it on your blog.

Activity 6: As a family, are there any cultural activities you do together? This might relate to food, celebrations, festivals. Write a post about at least one of them.

Activity 7. Add a widget to find out where your commenters are coming from.

There are many different widgets you can use – clustrmaps, flag counter, feedjit or revolver map. Have you seen any others while visiting blogs of other students? Maybe you could write a post about why you chose the commenter widget you have put on your blog.

Activity 8. Add one or more widgets about your area of the world

This might include a clock or weather or a translator widget in case students who don’t speak your language can translate your post.

When adding widgets to your sidebar, copy and paste the embed code into a text box on your sidebar. Save then close.
If the widget is too wide, you will have to adjust the number next to ‘width’ in the embed code.
This might appear more than once in the code.If using blogger rather than Edublogs, you might need to check out the instructions for adding widgets and images etc from Bling For Your Blog, written by a teacher in New Zealand. Thanks Allanah.

If your blog is an Edublogs free blog, you might not be able to put all the widgets in your sidebar. If using Kidblog or Weebly you might not be able to add widgets so put them in a post instead or a widgets page on your blog.

Activity 9 Visit other participants and ask questions

Visit at least five other blogs from students or classes around the world and ask some questions in your comments. How many countries are represented in the challenge participants? Have you been to a blog from each of these countries?

Activity 10 Questions in a post

Write a post including at least 6 questions about the different countries mentioned in activity 9.

Earlier in this set of challenges, we learnt all about you – your interests, your favourite foods, music and lots of other things when you wrote your ‘About’ page. This week we are going to learn all about the area or country in which you live.

When you write your posts or use web 2.0 tools, remember to be internet safe and not give away any personal information. Check with your teacher or parent, to find out if you can mention your school name or town.

But firstly, a few administration pointers.

I have started deleting students who have only a Hello world post, or have not written a post yet this year or have no avatar post or about me page.

Please check to make sure you have the following widgets visible on your blog’s sidebar: class blogs, pages (if not in header area), recent comments (10), recent posts (10), blogroll or links, categories. If not using Edublogs, the names of these widgets might be different.

Are you moderating your comments often? It can be annoying for your mentor to go to your blog and find no comments have been approved for the last month or so.

In your profile page, do you have your blog URL included? – this links to your name for when you leave a comment.

Categories: You will notice I mentioned having the category widget in your sidebar. This is a way to group your posts eg book reviews, history class, #16stubc for the student blogging challenge. Here is a link to a post about adding categories when using Edublogs or Blogspot where they are called labels.

Now let’s get to the activities.

Activity 1. Add a widget to find out where your commenters are coming from.

There are many different widgets you can use – clustrmaps, flag counter, feedjit or revolver map. Have you seen any others while visiting blogs of other students? Maybe you could write a post about why you chose the commenter widget you have put on your blog.

Activity 2. Add one or more widgets about your area of the world

This might include a clock or weather or a translator widget in case students who don’t speak your language can translate your post.

When adding widgets to your sidebar, copy and paste the embed code into a text box on your sidebar. Save then close.
If the widget is too wide, you will have to adjust the number next to ‘width’ in the embed code.
This might appear more than once in the code.If using blogger rather than Edublogs, you might need to check out the instructions for adding widgets and images etc from Bling For Your Blog, written by a teacher in New Zealand. Thanks Allanah.

If your blog is an Edublogs free blog, you might not be able to put all the widgets in your sidebar. If using Kidblog or Weebly you might not be able to add widgets so put them in a post instead or a widgets page on your blog.

Activity 3. Write a post about 3 tourist attractions in your country.

Miss W and Mr Davo Devil will be visiting outback New South Wales and outback Queensland for two weeks in April then at the end of June going to Denver, Colorado USA for 10 days. They enjoy looking at historical places and nature. Suggest 3 tourist attractions in your country they would enjoy visiting. Don’t copy and paste, write about them in your own words. Try to make it a personal piece of writing if you have actually been there.

Activity 4. A year in your town

Write a post, create a glogster, make an audioboo tape, create a Storybird or add a Voki telling Miss W about the festivals held in your town throughout the year. Which festivals do you enjoy the most and why? When are the festivals held in case she can visit one while she is travelling? If under 13, check with your teacher or parent if you want to use a web 2.0 tool rather than writing a post in your blog.

Activity 5. Visit other participants and ask questions

Visit at least five other blogs from students or classes around the world and ask some questions in your comments.

Write a post asking questions about the different countries mentioned in activity 5. Have at least 6 questions in your post.

Activity 7. Where I would love to visit and why

Write a post or use a web 2.0 tool telling your readers about a place you would love to visit and why. Try to include some hyperlinks (links that are underlined in your post area and take your readers to another website)

Activity 8. Create a game or quiz about your town, state or country

A few places to do this include: Quiz Revolution, Class Tools, Scratch

Remember to check with your teacher or parent before using these web 2.0 tools. Sometimes your teacher or parent will create an account that is moderated by them and is therefore safe for students to use. Do you know any other places to create games and quizzes?

A post looks a lot more interesting if you have included an image, as long as it relates to the topic you are writing about.

But where can you get these images?

I’ll Google it

NO NO NO

Not every image on the web can be used in your blog. You need to find ones that have a creative commons license and then you need to give attribution to the owner of that image somewhere on your post.

What’s attribution?

A note to show that someone else took the photo and they have given you permission to use it.

But how can I know that?

Using the correct images, clip art, music and videos is a very necessary skill for both teachers and students. Sue Waters has written a brilliant post showing how to find images, how to give attribution and how to add them correctly to your blog posts.

If you want lots of other activities for using images correctly, check out our post from the March challenge. This includes a couple of videos you could use in class regarding images.

If you are using an Edublogs blog, you have a plugin called Compfight. Here is part of the teacher’s post that Sue Waters has written about using this on your blog.

To activate, go to dashboard> plugins> find compfight and click on activate> then go to settings and change to look like mine above – #4 is what I actually change.

………………………………………………….

Time now to get to the activities:

Many students mentioned in their About Me posts about their love of family and doing things with them like playing volleyball with cousins, or going camping during summer. So the activities for this week will need an image included.

Activity 1: Write a post about a favourite time with your family.

Include an image with attribution. If using an actual image of your own family, you need permission from your parents and everyone shown in the image. Make sure you mention in the post that you have permission to use this and maybe that it is copyright to your family so no one else may use it without your family’s permission.

Activity 2: Write a post about a person who has passed away.

Maybe a family member who you have a picture of in your family archives. Or maybe a famous person from your town or country.

Activity 3. Have a relative write a post about their parents or grandparents

They could tell you about their parents/grandparents or you could interview them and ask questions. Find an image of something that was happening in the world during that person’s lifetime. Remember to give attribution.

Widgets

Many of you are now starting to get visitors to your blog. They may come from your own country or maybe from overseas.

Activity 4. Add at least one new widget to your sidebar and write a post explaining why you chose that particular widget.

Activity 5. What have you learnt about using images on your blog? Write a post, create a poster or video explaining your understanding now.

Activity 6. Write a post in your native language using an image as a prompt. Make sure you have a translate widget on your blog for your visitors to use. Check out the Serbian students linked on this sidebar.

Still got more time?

Visit other blogs either class or student – choose bloggers from other countries, maybe you will start getting some dots on your clustrmap or some flags on your widget.

Look out for another special event post coming soon – lots of creativity for this one.

Check out the magazine on the sidebar – are you featured in there yet?

Also check out the One World Our World magazine – this is where I am flipping the Raise Your Voice posts

Visit these posts from previous weeks which can’t be flipped to our magazine:

Starting next week, I will only be visiting blogs where students or classes have left the URL to the postin a comment with an explanation. If your teacher is moderating your posts, you will need to wait until it has been published before giving me your URL. Check out the difference between a blog URL and a post URL.

Why not visit lots of these links during your holiday or break and write a post about the new sites you enjoyed. Remember to include a link in your post somewhere so others can find the site easily from your post.

Remember to still check out the links on the sidebar of the challenge blog as well as the Get Help links if using blogspot or kidblog.

Students– Check to see if you have a mentor assigned to you. Remember to check your comments and reply to any left by your mentor. Their first comment will probably be on your first post or your about me page that you created last week in the challenge. You might also need to check your spam folder.

Also check to see you are only mentioned once on the spreadsheet. Do this by using CTRL F and typing in your name. It will then allow you to scroll through to find out if you are mentioned more than once. Leave me a comment mentioning your name and URL and how many times you are on the list.

Classes – Please start making connections with other classes of a similar age or subject area in the higher grades. If you find a link on the spreadsheet that goes to a student blog rather than a class blog, please email me so I can take it off the list. Remember to leave a link on challenge posts once you have completed one of the activities for that post. I will visit to leave comment and also add you as a possible example for the next challenge in September.

OK, what did you learn while reading the blog and listening to Mrs Yollis and her students tell you about how to write great comments? If your school didn’t allow you to go to her post, I have included the video at the bottom of this post. I have also included a video for high school students about commenting. Teachers: a link to teaching quality commenting including more videos and information.

Let’s start talking online

It has been great to see a number of students and classes starting to visit other blogs and leave comments. Which of the following comments would you prefer to find on your blog?

wassup

this is a great blog. i like Katy Perry too. plz visit my blog at ……………..

G’day John, I enjoyed reading your post about Talk like a Pirate Day. We also did that in our class. We dressed as pirates, spoke using pirate terms, but also found out there are still pirates roaming the seas even in modern times. Do you know how they are different to the old time pirates? Visit our class blog to read what we found out. ……………. Miss Wyatt

Activity 1: Write a post, create a video or create a poster about commenting.

Might be tips to get more visitors, guidelines for acceptable comments on your blog, examples of good and bad comments – think outside the square. Remember you don’t have to approve all comments. It is your blog; send some to the trash and if it is a company trying to get you to visit their blog to buy something, then label it as spam.

Activity 2:Write a really interesting post that you think will get lots of comments.

Often writing about one of your passions will get lots of comments, so will something controversial where your readers could agree or disagree with your opinion. Remember to end with a question so your readers can give an answer. If you are on Twitter use the hashtag #stubc15 to mention your post. Otherwise leave a comment on this challenge post so I can add it to twitter.

Activity 3:Have a family member write a post for you to add to your blog.

They could write it and email or post it to you. Does this post attract more visitors or family members leaving comments? One family member regularly blogs on Mrs Yollis’ blog – Where is nonno?

Activity 4: Write a post about the overseas blogs you have commented on.

We have over 35 countries represented in our class and student blogging participants. Visit some of them, read their posts and leave a quality comment. Why did you choose that blog and particular post?

Now you have started visiting other blogs, there might be some you want to visit often. Instead of having to go to the student participation page each time, you can add them as links on the sidebar of your blog. If using Edublogs Pro or campus with My Class activated, in your dashboard> appearance> widgets> drag across Class blogs to your sidebar. Change the number to 30 or however many in your class.

PS Students using Kidblog might have to write a post including the links as I don’t think you can have a blogroll on your own sidebar.

To make it easy for visitors to find the blogs of your classmates and friends you need to add their link on your blogroll.

If using Edublogs or campus and you want to add classmates, overseas blogs or links to other websites you use often like mathletics, reading eggs etc then dashboard> appearance> widgets> links or blogroll

If you want to group your links, then use link categories. These might be ‘Overseas friends’ or for links about your hobbies you might need a category for ‘Cricket’ or ‘Tasmanian Devils’ or ‘Online Games’.

To create these link categories, go to dashboard> links> Link Categories> put in the name of a category and save.

Back to your dashboard> links> add new link. Fill in the name of the person or website, then under web address put in the URL of their blog. Remember to include the http:// part. Choose which category you want the link to be under then click add link.

Activity 6: Learn some HTML code to include a link in a comment or to improve the look of a comment.

Mrs Yollis explains this in her post link above. Might be a way to include a link to your blog whenever you leave a comment. On my challenge blog, I have a post called do not publish and this is where I keep HTML code to help with my blog URL at the end of a comment. You might want to leave a comment on this post and tell me what you have found interesting about commenting. Use some HTML code in your comment. If <b> doesn’t work try <strong> instead.

These are threaded comments where the reader clicks on reply underneath the first comment – this is then indented slightly and the next reply is indented further. Some themes are good for 5 threads while other themes you might end up with only one word on each line on the 5th thread. To change the number of threads go to dashboard> settings> discussion and change to whatever number you want from 1-10

Do you have to answer every comment? That is up to you. Some comments allow for a great conversation while others might just need a “Thank you for leaving a comment on my blog.”

How do you know if someone has answered your comment on their blog? When you leave a comment on a blog, there might be a tick box about notify me by email. Click on that box and you will be notified every time someone leaves a comment on that post. You can easily unsubscribe later if you want to stop having the emails, by checking the bottom of the email where there should be an unsubscribe link.

Activity 8: Add a widget to find out where your readers are coming from.

There are many different widgets you can use – clustrmaps, flag counter, feedjit Have you seen any others while visiting blogs of other students? Maybe you could write a post about why you chose the reader widget you have put on your blog. Remember you might get lots of readers, but not everyone is comfortable leaving a comment.

Activity 9. Questions in a post

Write a post asking questions about one country mentioned in activity 4. Have at least 6 questions in your post. If your questions are interesting you might get lots of comments. Remember to tweet about it or leave a comment on this post, so I can tweet. #stubc15

Firstly, with over 1000 students now registered, I am sorting out mentors to be allocated to students. I don’t want one student to end up with more than one mentor but this will happen if you are on the student list more than once. So PLEASE check the student list and leave a comment on this post if you are on there more than once. I will need your name, URL, country and age to make it easier for me to find you on the list.

Secondly, we still have some classes and students who have privacy settings not allowing others to read posts and/or comment. To check if this is you, go to your blog but DON’T login. Now try reading and commenting. Are you allowed to? If not, then neither will your visitors. Please change the privacy settings. Any students or classes who still don’t allow comments by Easter will be deleted from the lists.

Thirdly, instead of filling in a Google form each week of the challenge, please come back to the post and leave a comment including the URL of your blog post. In April I will be starting a new flipboard magazine and will be adding the great posts from both students and classes to that.

Now let’s get to the challenge.

Only 220 years ago, it used to take a sailing ship about 4 or 5 months to sail from England to Australia with convicts on board. It took me 24 hours, including time zone changes, to fly from Australia to Vancouver, Canada with a short stop in Hawaii for a couple of hours. Yet it took only seconds for my class to connect in 2008 when we used Skype to make a call.

Students born in the last twenty years should be taking it for granted that they will be working collaboratively with students and teachers across the world using modern technology.

So this week’s challenge is to tell the world about the area you live in – your town, your state or province, your country in general. But hopefully you will also be having international visitors coming to your blog, so you need some way of knowing where they are coming from. There will be many options of what to do this week ranging from adding widgets, creating avatars, writing posts, leaving comments by visiting international blogs.

Activity 1 Adding widgets

To tell people about your area – check out the widgetbox for weather, news and clocks

Activity 3. Being such a small world now, many classes take part in global events such as Earth Hour (coming up very soon, so register this week), Safer Internet Day (back in February), Global Read Aloud Day (ideas for books needed), Pi Day (just passed) and Clean Up Day (just passed in Australia). Write a post or posts about special global events you or your class have taken part in. What did you learn from the event? Why should it be global?

Activity 3. If I were to visit your state or province, what would be the ‘must see’ places and why?

Activity 4.Create a quizabout your state, country; this website is good for embedding a quiz. Try my quiz about Tasmania

Thanks to Celia for reminding me that this site is only for those over 13 years old.

Activity 5. Finally, just for fun, if you have completed one of the other activities perhaps you could try this activity.

When “daddysitting” my father who is just out of hospital, I asked him to give me an activity relating to the topic for this week. He said what about a story about the journey of a small animal like an ant. Remember be creative, use a different webtool and embed into your blogpost.

Still got time left this week:

Visit other student and class blogs and read the about pages. Leave quality comments.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035555243@N01/16600310

Last week we learnt all about you – your interests, your favourite foods, music and lots of other things when you wrote your ‘About’ page. This week we are going to learn all about the area in which you live.

As many of you know, I will be visiting the USA and Canada (in fact I am in California now). When you write your posts or use web 2.0 tools, remember to be internet safe and not give away any personal information. Check with your teacher or parent, to find out if you can mention your school name or town.

But firstly, a few administration pointers.

Please check to make sure you have the following widgets visible on your blog’s sidebar: blog avatar, pages, recent comments, recent posts, blogroll or links, categories. If not using Edublogs, the names of these widgets might be different.

Have you made sure you are getting an email whenever someone leaves a comment on your blog so you can moderate this? It can be annoying for your mentor to go to your blog and find no comments have been approved for the last month or so.

In your profile page, do you have your blog URL included? – this links to your name for when you leave a comment.

Now let’s get to the activities.

Activity 1. Add a widget to find out where your commenters are coming from.

There are many different widgets you can use – clustrmaps, flag counter, feedjit Have you seen any others while visiting blogs of other students? Maybe you could write a post about why you chose the commenter widget you have put on your blog.

Activity 2. Add one or more widgets about your area of the world

This might include a clock or weather or a translator widget in case students who don’t speak your language can translate your post.

When adding widgets to your sidebar, copy and paste the embed code into a text box on your sidebar.

Save then close.

If the widget is too wide, you will have to adjust the number next to ‘width’ in the embed code.

This might appear more than once in the code.

If using blogger rather than Edublogs, you might need to check out the instructions for adding widgets and images etc from Bling For Your Blog, written by a teacher in New Zealand. Thanks Allanah.

If your blog is an Edublogs free blog, you might not be able to put all the widgets in your sidebar.

Activity 3. Write a post about a tourist attraction in the following states or provinces.

Miss W and Mr Davo Devil will be visiting these states and provinces: California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and back to California. They enjoy visiting national parks and historical places. Where would you suggest they go while in those states and provinces? Suggest a tourist attraction in at least 5 places.

Activity 4. A year in your town

Write a post, create a glogster, make an audioboo tape, create a Storybird or add a Voki telling Miss W about the festivals held in your town throughout the year. Which festivals do you enjoy the most and why? When are the festivals held in case she can visit one while she is travelling? If under 13, check with your teacher or parent if you want to use a web 2.0 tool rather than writing a post in your blog.

Activity 5. Visit other participants and ask questions

Visit at least five other blogs from students or classes around the world and ask some questions in your comments. We have participants from Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, Hong Kong, China, South Korea, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Russia, Colombia, Taiwan, Greece and Indonesia taking part in the challenge.

Activity 6. Questions in a post

Write a post asking questions about the different countries mentioned in activity 5. Have at least 6 questions in your post.

Activity 7. Where I would love to visit and why

Write a post or use a web 2.0 tool telling your readers about a place you would love to visit and why. Try to include some hyperlinks (links that are underlined in your post and take your readers to another website)

Activity 8. Create a game or quiz about your town, state or country

A few places to do this include: Quiz Revolution, Class Tools, Remember to check with your teacher or parent before using these web 2.0 tools. Sometimes your teacher or parent will create an account that is moderated by them and is therefore safe for students to use. Do you know any other places to create games and quizzes?

Copy this trackback link in any posts you write about these activities: Challenge 2 Sept 2011 so I will know to visit your blog and read your post or else leave a comment on this post directing me to your blog.

I’ve been reading a few posts lately about testing time occurring in May in many countries. Here in Australia, we have our NAPLAN testing in literacy and numeracy for all students in grades 3, 5, 7 and 9. Many students have been learning how to write in a persuasive style as this is what the piece of written work will assess.

So this week’s challenges will relate to persuasive writing or something to do with testing.

I asked last week for some more ideas for challenges, so I will also be using them.

Students and classes

Activity 1 – It’s a testing time

Write a post using a persuasive style of writing. You might like to use glogster to create a poster. Maybe wallwisher to get ideas from other students before you write your post.

Topics might include:

That mobile phones should be used in classrooms

That all students should have a personal blog from Grade 6 onwards

That all classes should have a class blog

That national or statewide testing has no valuable purpose for the student

A topic of your own choice

Activity 2 – Review time

Janis wrote a post about how April is review month ready for the big exams in May. Check out her suggestion for a post. This might be good for those students who have taken part in more than one of the student challenges last year and this year.

Activity 3 – Learning time

Think about something important you have learned outside of school – remember we should all be life long learners not just learners while at school. How did you learn it? Why is it important to you? Who or what taught you about it? How has this learning helped you in your life?

Activity 4 – Widget choice

Since you have been visiting lots of different student blogs, you will have noticed many widgets on sidebars of student blogs. Write a post about the widgets you have added to your blog and why you chose them.

Remember some widgets are for students 13+. Also if adding a music widget, try to have it on silent when your blog opens, or your visitors might be blasted with loud noises when they visit your blog.

Activity 5 – My regular visitors

Have you noticed in your comments, there are certain people visiting often? Or maybe, you have only had one or two visitors. How can you increase the number of visitors to your blog? How can you make sure they leave a comment and start conversations about your posts? Perhaps you could interview one of your regular commenters like Mikayla did in my class.

Activity 6 – Wordle your blog

Have you created a wordle from your blog? Check out the one Abbey created for one of our previous activities. If you have problems embedding your wordle, ask Abbey some questions or try to get rid of some of the extra spaces in the embed code. Remember if you do a printscreen and save as an image, you still need to give attribution to the wordle website.

Activity 7 – Internet safety

The students at our school recently had a drama performance by Bamboo Theatre company from Sydney who were touring around Tasmanian schools. Both students and staff found much interesting information about being safe on the web. Part of it was facebook and your settings. Have you had lessons on being internet safe? Do you use a certain program at school that teaches these things? Write a post about how you learn about internet safety.

Privacy on Facebook – these links might be more useful for the older students taking part in the challenge. How many of you have used default settings when joining Facebook?

Now that you have checked out these posts, have you made any changes to your Facebook settings? Write a post about your use of Facebook and how it might be affecting your digital footprint on the web. Check out this post by Derek who I found last year by using the count out three game.

The game is on …. The game is on ….

The game is called count out three. Those students who have taken part in a student blogging challenge before will have already played this game. But we have many different students taking part in the challenge this year, so you should be visiting different blogs for the game in 2011.

Do this activity at least three times and finally, write your own post saying which blogs you visited and what posts you left a comment on. Why did you choose that post? Remember to include a link back to the post you left a comment on so that student gets a pingback or trackback.

I know students and classes love having a badge or widget on their blog showing they are taking part in the student blogging challenge. I sent an email earlier this month to the people at Edublogs asking if they could design a badge for this challenge. Ronnie came back with a design which we have altered slightly depending if you are a student blogger, class blogger or mainly leaving comments.

Pick the badge that suits you and follow the instructions for adding to your blog. You might want to use it as a link to the student blogging challenge page. You shouldn’t need to crop or resize the badges as they are less than 170 pixels in width and height.

How many students and classes do you think are taking part in this challenge? If you guessed about 100 classes and 1300 students you were correct. In fact we are represented by 18 different countries of the world, so we are definitely going global.

This week’s activities relate to all things global – tracking widgets, maps, translators and other forms of global challenges.

Students

Activity 1 – How do you know where your visitors are coming from?

Do you have a widget tracking these visitors? If not, then perhaps you could put one or more of these widgets on your blog.

Remember, if you have a free Edublogs blog, often you can’t embed widgets in your sidebar because of the coding. Check if your teacher has a paid pro blog where they can then upgrade 50 student or teacher blogs, then you will be able to use code.

Can you recommend any other tracking widgets suitable for class or student blogs? Leave a comment if you can.

Activity 2 – How do you read a blog written in a language other than your mother tongue?

Natasa, a teacher of one of the class blogs, is located in Serbia and her blog is written in Serbian. How can you translate that page so you can read it in English or Spanish if that is your mother tongue? Do you leave a comment in English, your mother tongue or Serbian?

A visitor from Colombia has come across your blog and wants to read it in their mother tongue, how will they translate it?

A good idea would be for you to have a translator button or widget on your blog. Visit the widget box to find one that you think will do the job of translating your blog into another language. Add the widget the same as instructions for the flag counter.

Activity 3 – Write a post in another language

Most students around the world have to learn another language as part of their school curriculum. This might be a challenge for those who are just beginning their language learning but for students like Dominique, this should be a breeze. Make sure you have a translator widget on your blog to make it easier for your visitors to read the post.

Activity 4 – Write a post about a global activity you have taken part in

Have you taken part in :

World Maths or Spelling Day

World Water Day – this is happening on Tuesday, March 22 – theme is water for cities

Earth Hour – this is happening on Saturday, March 26 – see video in class section of challenge

These global events often have widgets or buttons you can embed on your blog.

Activity 5 – Leave a comment on ten blogs

Each blog must be from a different country of the world. Check out the list of students and classes taking part. Remember there are actually 18 countries represented – some have only one person taking part, so you might need to check carefully.

Classes

Activity 1 – Complete student activities 1, 2 and 4

What other types of global activities have you taken part in as a class? ePals, postcards from home, quadblogging – tell us about it in a great post with images if possible. Or write a post linking to other global activity posts you have already written about.

Activity 2 – Take part in Earth Hour this year and write a post about how students, teachers and families spent that hour. Earth Hour began three years ago in Australia in one town – see how it has now grown to be a global activity.

Activity 3 – How many languages are spoken by the students in your class?

Is your class multicultural or is it predominantly a one language classroom?

What are some of the cultural activities you might celebrate in your classroom?

What do your students celebrate at home?

Perhaps you could create a poll to put on your class blog and have parents and grand parents answer where they came from originally.

Perhaps one of them could write a post, with their child or grandchild, about a celebration from their country to put on your class blog.